April in Paris

by Michael Wallner

  I stood on the Champs-Elysées. The trees lining it were so far from the middle of the street that I couldn’t tell whether they were plane trees or lindens. I actually couldn’t spot a single civilian. The sun turned the street into a bright wedge. The quartermaster hastened back to his Kübelwagen, calling back over his shoulder, “Hurry it up!” I clasped my hands behind my back, raised my head, and stepped out like a field marshal. Only for a few meters. Then the truck’s horn sounded behind me.

  Weariness in my legs. And dizziness inside my skull. I leaned my forehead against the wall and looked out for the sun, which was now directly behind the building. I realized I must have walked back and forth in my cell for three hours without stopping.

  Months before, I’d eavesdropped on a prisoner who was talking about his “daydreams.” Time seemed like an unreachable horizon; intoxication came through the whitewashed walls, he said. In the second year of his solitary confinement, he’d dreamed for as long as seven hours a day with his eyes open while pacing the equivalent of twenty kilometers in his cell. He developed blisters without feeling them.

  I wondered how my brain and my nerves would react to what was coming. Hundreds of men had been interrogated in my presence, and I’d watched how they changed in the face of death. When hope was extinguished and the body helplessly exposed to pain, something incredible happened. A person became someone else.

  They didn’t come for me that afternoon, or that first night, either. The meal procession went past my cell twice. I was hungry, but I didn’t present myself at the door. Instead, I stayed flat on my back and tried not to notice the smell of meat and onions.

  The next morning—it was before breakfast was brought around—I heard three evenly spaced taps. I sprang to my feet. Three more taps. I darted around the cell, listening over the washbasin, listening to the heating pipe. The sounds were coming from behind the plank bed. There must have been a pipe running through the wall. I looked around for an object I could use. I hadn’t received any bowl or spoon, and it would take too long to pull off my boots. I opened my shirt and took off my ID tags, then gave the wall three evenly spaced taps.

  An answer came at once. I hoped the other fellow would use the quadratic tapping alphabet—it was the only code I knew. The wall didn’t have much resonance. I had to lean my head against it in order to hear clearly. As I did so, I kept my eye on the peephole in the door.

  The other guy was obviously a practiced hand; he tapped unhurriedly. I pictured the square box: five horizontal lines, each with five letters. He tapped four times—the fourth row, p through t—and then five: t. Then a pause, followed by three taps, then five. Third row, fifth letter: o. Two, four: i. I understood: Toi? Names had no meaning here, but at least I knew my fellow prisoner was French. I lowered the hand with the tags. I was still a soldier in the German Wehrmacht; exchanging messages in tapping code with a Frenchman couldn’t help my situation. I took a deep breath. There was no situation. Very soon, they’d know everything.

  I began. One and one: A. Three, then four: n. As I introduced myself as Monsieur Antoine, my “handwriting” became more fluid.

  The other’s name was Henri. He asked: Since yesterday?

  Affirmative. He asked if there was any Paris news. I hesitated. He could just as easily be a political prisoner as someone in jail for an ordinary crime. I kept my answer general. We “talked” for half an hour. The tapping stopped suddenly, in the middle of a sentence. Then, hastily: Now.

  I pictured a cell door above or below me being unlocked and Henri brought out. In my mind, they took him to my former unit, where another translator sat in my place. The corporals and the water tub stood ready.

  It was only now, from one moment to the next, that I felt sick. I retched and bent over the toilet bucket. I hadn’t had anything to eat, so nothing came up but whitish phlegm. I sank to my knees and heard my gasps reverberating in the bucket’s metal sides.

  During one of our chats by the window, Leibold had explained to me that any physical pain is bearable if one knows beforehand what’s coming. Many subjects, he said, behaved as though they were undergoing a surgical procedure. They screamed and panted and waited for the moment when it would be over. Afterward, they were the same as ever. Only with the unknown could you obtain results, because it offered no standard of measurement. Faced with the unknown, the offender had no way of assessing his own powers of resistance and couldn’t foresee how he would react. Every subject was affected by this anxiety, the fear that in this situation he might say something that could never again be put right.

  I lay down on the straw mattress. Leibold had figured out a way of surprising every prisoner so far. Men with trained minds, brutes with broad shoulders and giant paws—none of them had left the interrogation room “the same as ever.” All of them had been caught in their special place. Sometimes it took days, but the captain was patient and found the right way. The soft-voiced Austrian with the sad eyes, the man who loved mountains and knew plants by their Latin names, was a master of the unknown. It occurred to me that he’d been seriously burned and wouldn’t be healed anytime soon. I’d be brought before someone I wouldn’t be able to assess. I couldn’t predict any part of the process except the result.

  I rolled to my feet and started pacing again. The certainty of what was in store for me made me feel strangely at ease; the melancholy of the last weeks abated. I washed my face, arms, and chest with cold water, rinsed out my mouth, and dried myself off with my shirt. As I got under way again, I recalled the techniques I’d been a witness to. I tried to imagine the physical sensations they produced. But I knew that mental practice alone would not suffice. I knelt down, lifted the iron bedstead a little, and laid one hand under it. With the other, I pushed down on the bed, slowly, as hard as I could. The dull metal of the bed leg cut into the back of my hand; something threatened to break. I pushed harder and counted the seconds. After two minutes, I relaxed the pressure and noticed that my heart beat faster after the torture than during it. A dark bruise spread across the back of my hand; a deep square imprint was clearly visible. The pain radiated all the way to my shoulder. I was satisfied with myself. Suddenly, I felt an eye at the peephole behind me. Standing up, I resumed my walk as if nothing had happened.

  22

  The third day. The meal procession passed for the fifth time; the food smelled good. I didn’t go to the peephole. I knew they weren’t simply overlooking me; their neglect was purposeful. I wasn’t a heavy smoker, but during those hours I longed mightily to combat my hunger with tobacco. By afternoon, my desire for a cigarette was overpowering. I hammered my fists against the door. It took fifteen minutes of this before a guard opened the little window where the peephole was set.

  “Yes?”

  “I’d like to buy some cigarettes from the canteen.”

  “Have you got money?”

  “It was taken away from me when I was brought here.”

  “Then you have to write out a request to change your money into coupons.”

  “I don’t have a pencil.”

  “You can buy a pencil from the canteen.”

  “Without any money?”

  I suppressed my rage and stepped back from the door. The little window closed. I drank water from my hands; the bruise had turned black.

  That afternoon, I had the shivers. The wound near my eye started twitching. I was afraid the eyeball might have been damaged. I touched the bandage, loosened it on the side, and felt the spot where the burning sensation was. Even though it wasn’t close to bedtime, I wrapped myself in both blankets and lay there trembling for hours. With my healthy eye, I examined the opposite wall of my cell, focusing on every uneven spot and learning the wall by heart, like a map.

  The lightbulb went out. The sound of the last footsteps faded away outside. Once again, the food cart hadn’t stopped at my door. I stood up and started walking in the dark. The rectangular glimmer of t
he window, six and a half steps; the door, six and a half steps. After awhile, I imagined I heard tapping, but when I threw myself on the bed and listened, the sound had stopped. I took off my ID tags and tapped. Four, five, pause. One, one, pause. One, two. Henri didn’t answer. Lying down increased the pressure in my injured eye. I sat up, pushed the mattress against the wall, and leaned against it. I was cold. An image crossed my mind, the memory of an older detainee who had fainted during a procedure. They woke him up with cold water. Then they punched his teeth out, he collapsed, and they poured more water on him and kicked his head. He crawled over the floor tiles. It turned out later that they’d damaged his inner ear and he wasn’t answering the questions because he couldn’t hear them anymore. When they carried him out, the floor was awash.

  Suddenly, I couldn’t remember what I’d just been thinking. I was aching for a cigarette. I stayed awake until dawn. My back hurt from sitting in a curved position for so long; my eye was throbbing. The shivering came over me in irregular waves. As the sky grew brighter, I finally lost consciousness.

  Minutes later, the sirens woke me up.

  23

  At roll call the next morning, I demanded to be taken to a doctor. Two SS privates did the honors. We moved through a long gallery. Noises from the cells, the sounds of French. I could hear singing behind one door.

  We passed a room with three high chairs. Clipping machines hung from the wall on long cables. This was where heads were cropped. The door at the end of the hall bore a red cross. One soldier escorted me inside while the other waited for him.

  The doctor wore a white coat over his uniform. He was the same thickset man who treated the interrogation victims. He was smoking. I inhaled greedily. Many metal basins filled with bloody cotton balls and bandages were scattered about. A French newspaper lay on top of various medical instruments—forceps and syringes, an old-fashioned stethoscope.

  “He has pain in his eye,” the soldier said to the doctor.

  “Let’s have a look.” The doctor balanced his cigarette on the edge of the table and took off my bandage. He removed the final layer with a yank, tearing off the scab. The pain bent me double.

  “I’m a prisoner awaiting trial,” I gasped, “and I have the right to be treated correctly.”

  Unimpressed, the doctor picked up his cigarette and took a drag; with his other hand, he examined my wound.

  “Not so bad.”

  I tried to keep still. “Is the eyeball damaged?”

  “Won’t be able to tell that until after the swelling goes down,” he said. He straightened up and looked at me closely. There was a tear-shaped birthmark between his eyebrows. I closed my good eye and saw a bright veil; the other’s face was no more than a silhouette. I smelled his nicotine breath.

  “I’ll examine it again in a few days.” He dipped a cotton ball in a brown solution and daubed it on my wound. I drew in my breath through my teeth and nearly toppled over. The physician’s voice came from far away: “Stop making such a fuss. You act as though I’m taking off one of your legs.”

  All my illusions about being armed against pain collapsed. My helplessness frightened me.

  While the doctor was putting on a new bandage, I asked him, “Would you perhaps give me a cigarette?” He and the private briefly exchanged glances.

  “Take the pack. It’s almost empty.”

  The bright veil over my wounded eye disappeared again.

  I could scarcely wait to get back to my cell. At the door, I asked one of the privates for a light. Seconds later, I was sitting on my plank bed, leaning my head against the wall and smoking. I savored the mild burning sensation of the tobacco and held the smoke in my lungs for a long time. The delightful dizziness persisted until midday. This time, the food cart stopped at my door: buckwheat soup and a large chunk of bread. I plied my spoon greedily. After the meal, I took another walk. My pain eased a little.

  When they came for me, dusk was already falling. The sullen, solemn expressions on the SS privates’ faces let me guess what our destination was. The heavy doors opened; we went past the shearing room and the doctor’s office and down long flights of stairs. Marble hadn’t been used so lavishly here as in the front part of the building. For the first time, I stepped into the courtyard I used to look down into every day. We walked over ice-covered stone slabs, falling into step together from force of habit. I spotted the garden shed. Was that where the one-armed fellow kept his scything rig? We reentered the building through an iron door.

  The narrow stairwell was windowless and led to a brightly lighted room. I was told to wait. The privates left the room by the same door we’d entered through. On the other side, there was a second door. That’s it, I thought. Whoever goes through here has arrived at the heart of the rue des Saussaies.

  It was at least an hour before they finally came. Two corporals; I knew them both. They took up positions on either side of me. I stood up and walked purposefully between them into the next room.

  I’d never entered my workplace from that side before. The desks were placed in such a way that the person under interrogation was in the jaws of a pincer. Beyond them was the narrow connecting door that Leibold and I had walked through every day. A uniformed secretary sat in the seat that until a short while ago had been mine. He was smooth-skinned, no longer young, and he kept his eyes on his paper.

  The second lieutenant looked up from the file on his desk. I recognized him; he was the one with the bleating laugh. We’d drunk schnapps together at Turachevsky’s.

  “Is someone treating your wound?” he asked. Nothing in his behavior suggested that he remembered.

  I nodded and sat on the only unoccupied chair. The sharp look he gave me brought me back to my feet.

  “Then there’s nothing to prevent you from answering a few questions.” Now he pointed me to the chair, and we sat down at the same time. The clerk reached for his pencil.

  “How is Captain Leibold?” I asked, and instantly saw that I’d made a terrible mistake. I was suspected of high treason; the man across from me was a superior officer. My attempt to act like a member of the family had the opposite effect.

  “Since when have you been providing information to the enemy?” the lieutenant asked, his voice unchanged. He opened the file. “Tell us the names of your contacts and describe the operations they’re planning.”

  If a prisoner answered the three standard questions immediately and completely, he was spared the worst. The previous night, a sentence has crossed my mind: “You can’t confess a lie.” I didn’t know where I’d read it. Under the bright lamp, before the two corporals and the waiting lieutenant, I replied, “I have never divulged any internal information. I have no contacts, and therefore I know nothing of their operations.”

  The second lieutenant nodded as if this were exactly the reply he’d been expecting. “We’ve got witnesses who have seen you in civilian clothes. Why do you pass yourself off as a Frenchman?”

  Only Rieleck-Sostmann could have betrayed me. Was she sitting in the next room at this moment, listening for the first scream? Was she wearing the gray suit that modestly covered her knees? Had she decided on a different hairdo?

  “Who says they’ve seen me?” I asked.

  “Do you wear civilian clothes in public or not?”

  I said nothing.

  He stood up. “Insubordination and fraternizing with the enemy!” He raised his fist, but it was a studied gesture. Soon he’d give his desk a good thump. One of the corporals moved slightly. The guy—was his name Franz?—was getting impatient. With the French offenders, the prelude rarely lasted so long.

  “Who are your contacts?” The second lieutenant’s fist came down heavily on the desk.

  “I have no contacts. I’m a Wehrmacht corporal, and I have—”

  I noticed the lieutenant’s nod. Almost simultaneously, the first blow struck me. It was as though my t
emple had been split in half. I flew off my chair; for several moments, everything was white. When I slowly looked up, the second lieutenant had a piece of paper in his hand. “We know the perpetrators’ names,” he said. “Gérard Joffo, Chantal Joffo, Théodore Benoît, Gustave Thiérisson. Were you in contact with these criminals?”

  “I…know two of them,” I replied with effort.

  “You were in contact with them!” the second lieutenant cried.

  “Gustave Thiérisson is a barber. I had my hair cut in his shop.”

  The second lieutenant stepped closer. His booted legs towered over me. “Would you have us believe you take off the uniform of the Reich, dress as a Frenchman, and associate with the leaders of a criminal organization without divulging any of the secret information to which your privileged position gives you access?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m saying.”

  At this point, I figured the corporals would start in on me again. Instead, the lieutenant asked, “Where are these people now?” and walked back to his desk.

  With a flash of hope, I realized that they hadn’t caught Chantal and her father. As long as the lieutenant could assume I knew their whereabouts, he and his man would spare me. “I don’t know exactly,” I said, being careful.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t think they’re in Paris anymore.”

  “Then where are they?”

  “I don’t know the exact place.”

  The second lieutenant waited until the clerk finished writing.

  “Since when did you know about the attack in this nightclub, this Turachevsky’s?” He pronounced the name awkwardly, as if the brothel were completely unknown to him.

  I’d thought about this. If they knew about my “double life” from Rieleck-Sostmann, they must believe I had something to do with the bomb. A grotesque story: German soldier falls under the spell of a beautiful Resistance fighter and allows himself to be enticed into colluding in the assassination of his own people. The actual facts were a bit soberer. I had known that Chantal was a member of the Resistance. I should have reported her. Instead of doing that, I’d warned her people about the imminent raid. According to the occupation law, I was guilty.